


Perchance to Dream

by blcwriter



Series: The Native Hue of Resolution [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Background non-graphic violence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Gen, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Queer Themes, historical handwaving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28338879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blcwriter/pseuds/blcwriter
Summary: An Old Guard Gift Exchange 2020 story for Tumblr user the-mangnolia-moon / AO3 whistler_vulture, who wanted Andromaquynh and any subject.  I hope you enjoy this pre-canon background story of Quynh up through her meeting with Andy.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Series: The Native Hue of Resolution [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2099922
Comments: 12
Kudos: 29
Collections: The Old Guard Gift Exchange 2020





	Perchance to Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



In the before times—before Quynh died her first death—she didn’t think much about the meaning of sleep, or of dreams. That was for priests and witches and mystics, telling stories to scare children and fools into behavior they deemed appropriate through interpretation of the “omens” sleep supposedly brought when the world was thinner and more open to whatever the spirts or gods had to say. 

Since those same priests and witches and mystics held that women ought to obey their fathers and brothers and husbands and sons above all else—that family piety mattered more than violence toward the women under their care for no reason other than to make something besides themselves hurt—Quynh was not minded to pay attention to whatever lessons dreams were supposed to teach her. There was no point in looking to dreams for meaning when your life was drudgery interspersed with the waking nightmare of her husband and his friends. 

She was pragmatic; her family was too poor and too exhausted from their own lives to be willing to help her. Her dowry had been little enough and Quynh bore them no love for how cheaply they'd sold her. She killed her husband after he beat her for losing their babe. She hadn’t even been trying to lose it, as she had hoped that a son would temper his temper. 

On a moondark night, Quynh burnt their hut to make it look as though they’d been robbed, and she taken— their farm was far out enough that it was plausible they’d been set upon by bandits without folk in the village being the wiser. She set the pigs free, killed a few chickens for appearances’ sake, took their valuables and left with their pony. He wasn’t useful to ride, but he could carry her things and bear her company until she reached someplace where she could sell him, trade her heaviest things, and move on. 

Quynh could weave and make baskets and pottery anywhere, and with the bandits troubling their part of the mountains, no one would be too surprised by a young widow who just wanted to make a quiet home, somewhere far from where she’d lost her whole life. 

People valued the quality of her goods in the town at the base of the mountains, near the trade route, and if people mistook her lack of interest in others as grief and piety instead of a wish to be left to herself, that was their mistake. She could rest between commissions, kept herself fed, and began to make a name with people who valued her skills more than her body.

The town was big enough that there were other women who lived lives without men, and enough women who, orphaned early, dressed as men without people being the wiser. People saw what they wanted—young boys whose growth was stunted from lack of food early on in their lives could be young boys, but they could also be clever young girls with short hair and bound breasts as well. So long as they showed up for work, kept their heads down, and didn’t try to make too much of a name for themselves, it was enough. 

One of the madams who bought Quynh’s weaving—a commissioned, expensive piece of red and black and ochre—eyed Quynh’s apartment and observed that there was only one exit. “Some man who thinks you’ve had enough of grieving could get in the way of the door. You should see Due in the guard and ask him to teach you how to use a knife.”

Quynh forbore to mention that countrywomen who could slay their own pigs knew enough about knives to use those skills elsewhere. It wouldn’t hurt to learn the bow, and the guards used them as well. 

Between the guards and their bows, the sheer size of the town, and the walls, life was more peaceful here. 

Due showed her the bow, as well as how to use a longknife, longer than her forearm. Better, he taught her how to make her own weapons, how to use bone when metal was scarce and sharpen it into knives and into arrowheads. They walked out to the woods, camping sometimes, and Quynh practiced until she could skewer rabbits and smaller animals with only one shot, whilst hiding in trees and in other places Due showed her. The hunting was useful; metal was expensive, but hunting provided meat, fur, and bones, sinew for her bows and her baskets, and what bones were too small for arrowheads could be made into beads for adornment. 

There were rumors that Due and Quynh were courting-- that the standoffish young guard had finally pierced the heart of the young widow with beautiful crafts and an icy demeanor. In a way, it was not untrue. They had spoken of keeping house with each other—the town was large enough that no one cared much for formal rites of marriage—but Due was as uninterested in bodily love as he was in admitting that under his armor he bore the same breasts and womb as Quynh. Worse, he was inclined to chatter with his brother guards in an idle way that grated on Quynh, who more and more valued words spoken in need rather than boredom. They agreed that in the long term they would not suit other than as hunting companions and keepers of each others’ secrets, and kept on being friends. 

In the end, the madam’s warning and Quynh’s skills learnt from Due had not mattered. The brigands banded together under a ruthless and longsighted leader. Their incursions on the trade route and the hill villages led to more organized attacks on the town. As someone who knew their way around weapons, now, and as desperate as the town became with the destruction of the surrounding farms, Quynh set aside her usual work and joined the guards on the walls and the hunters outside. Sleep was for rest and recovery, and lack of sleep was just to be borne until they could kill off enough thieves to make them think hard about returning. 

When Quynh was killed in battle, an arrow through her throat so that she couldn’t even give thanks to Due for the lessons that let her die as a man, unsubjected to whatever would come next when the walls fell, she closed her eyes in relief and welcomed the blackness of death. 

\--

When she woke, she didn’t bother worrying if she was in the in-between spirit world and finally being punished for the murder her husband deserved. The smell of blood and shit and fire was real enough that she knew that for some reason, she lived. She’d been dead long enough that the thieves had moved on, the town burnt and rubble, only small children and a few old people stumbling around. 

She couldn’t stay here, and Due lay dead not far from where Quynh had fallen, body unmolested but for the way his head was cleaved open. From what she could see, the whole town had been ransacked. She picked her way back to her home and dug out the coin she’d hidden-- prior peaceful years notwithstanding, it was foolish not to be ready to flee. The weapons she salvaged off the fallen guards, the firestarters, belt buckles, and other metal bits that the thieves left, the overlarge clothing in the guards’ barracks-- it was all small enough and light enough to carry, and these things were currency in their own way if she reached an unspoiled town, though she kept back two spare sets of the smallest boots she could find for herself. 

She’d started over before. She would do so again. 

Her first night headed further down toward the plains and the trade route, she slept—exhausted, parched, and stomach growling with hunger. She woke often, nightmares flashing with the sounds and sights of the battle, though it was all confused with trees she’d never seen and horses bigger and taller than she was used to. A woman’s face flashed through these scenes, unfamiliar and strange. Perhaps there were gods after all, but whatever their message, these dreams told Quynh nothing.

Her second night, she slept like a rock, having found a clean stream and netted herself two small birds to roast over a fire. Between the food, a bath in the stream and ample water to fill her skins, she felt like a queen. 

Her third night, she dreamt of strange woods again, and of long, pale faces gathered around a fire, singing strange songs in a tent that was nothing like the ones she had seen.

She tried not to think too much on it. The spirits and gods were apparently real enough to have her live when Quynh knew she had died. Aside from being alive in the first place and having strange dreams, her waking life was the same as ever it was. 

After some months, Quynh found a town worth stopping for. She told the story that had mostly been true these last handful of years, of being a widow who had escaped ransacking thieves. She apprenticed herself to the weaver, who was old and needed more help than she was ready to admit to. The woman was skilled and pragmatic enough to admit Quynh’s skills could only benefit them both, so it was easy to help and use the woman’s connections to increase their trade. When the weaver died in her sleep, she died well fed, in a comfortable, warm home with no leaks in her roof and plenty of blankets; no one questioned Quynh’s right to keep on in their home, plying her trade. Unfortunately, after a few years of slowly growing her own wealth, she had drawn too much attention from the head guard-- he wanted her wealth and thought her ongoing youth meant she would bear him strong sons. She killed him when he tried to waylay her in an alley, then loaded a wagon with her tools and supplies and moved on. 

Some towns, she left apprentices with solid trades of their own. In others, she stayed to learn a trade not yet known to her-- herbs and medicines were something it was always handy to know, and in one village she became known for her preserves. After some decades of this, Quynh took a lesson from Due and bound her breasts, dressed as a man, and signed on as a guard to one of the caravans. She learned how to ride the barrel-chested horses they bred to the east, learned how to use a pole arm, learned to start fires with wet kindling and animal dung when they passed into woods deep and strange before reaching the sea, salty, enormous, and promising more trade and travel than Quynh had already managed.

She learned trade tongue, and the tongues to the east and west of where she’d once called home. She sailed for some years. Once or twice she sailed as what would be considered a pirate, but when merchants tried to set themselves up as kings and terrorized the poor fishermen and small villages along the coast, better to be a pirate than king. She went ashore for a handful of years and took up her trades again, until she got bored and left to learn the new tongues traders brought and see if the goods they carried matched those worn by the woman stranger, of whom she still dreamt.

Many nights, but not all, she dreamt of grasses waving waist-high-- green, then golden, then sere, and horse hooves beating the ground, battles and smoke and the flash and thunk of axes in wood, flesh, and bone. She dreamt of death by choking, by drowning, by fire, but only once by rapine—that dream was followed by carnage of men with blue paint on their faces and bone in their ears and their hair, on the shore of a dark, stormy sea. The places in her dreams changed, but they still went on, year in and year out. There was only one constant—a tall, pale woman with sky-eyes, long dark hair, an axe with which she waged death, and the beat of hooves beneath her as if she were herself a horse. 

Sometimes, Quynh died. She was killed in attacks on her town, on her caravan, onboard ship—once, she died at a temple she’d visited to learn their techniques for fine glazes and to try their smooth clays. When she returned to life, she helped the few acolytes who lived return to the temple from which they started. None of them saw her return to life as anything other than their gods’ gift for defending them before she’d been killed, and Quynh was grateful enough still to keep returning to life. 

That changed. The strange dreams continued, but Quynh grew tired of traveling, of moving on, of having to listen for and dodge the growing legends she seemed to be accumulating. The beautiful woman described hewed too closely to her own looks. That she was someone who wandered from mountain to plain to sea to back again, a healer and craftswoman and fighter and sometimes a man, a person who was a vengeful spirit on those who wrongly hurt others, a skilled teacher to young orphaned people in need of a trade, a bestower of wealth on lonely folk with no one to help them-- they were good things, but the storytellers made much of her looks and if she stayed too long in one place or drew the attention of more well-traveled folks who had heard her tales elsewhere, then it became time to move on. She ought not have stayed so long with the monks, it seemed—religious acolytes everywhere told their trade in stories.

Still, she did not see why she should not help others, and she could not always help herself from entering a fight. She tended to kill first, find out why later if she came upon someone enacting violence on an elder, woman, or child. In her dreams, the sky-eyed woman did the same, though she also seemed to enjoy war more for its own sake. The woman felt bloodthirsty and yet kind in her own way-- she always had a gentle hand for the horses, and Quynh felt her smiles for the elders with white-rheumed eyes and gnarled hands.

The scenery around the woman changed enough that Quynh longed for a serious change of her own. She asked, and learned that there were endless grass plains to the north and the west at the ends of the traders’ roads—where indeed there were many people whose lives were lived horseback, no homes but the tents they and their animals carried. The traders said the people were tall, moon-pale with sky-eyes, and that at the edge of the grassland grew pointed trees. That was enough. 

As Qiang, she wore her hair back in a queue, rode and guarded-- if she was handier than the rest of the guards at the mending of harness and armor, tents and bedding, well—it was no shame to earn extra coin for being skilled at more than just swinging a sword. 

For years, she managed not to die, and still she dreamt of the woman. Though she hoped otherwise, even if she wasn’t real, her presence had kept Quynh moving and learning, not staying stuck in one place. As their caravan reached the towns on the Tigris, her dreams of the woman shifted location—sunnier, sandier places that at first had Quynh dismayed. There was no way to tell the woman to stay where she was, that Quynh was coming to her—but perhaps she had the same thought at Quynh and was seeking places that resembled whatever she saw if she saw Quynh in dreams.

That thought was both thrilling and terrifying—if the woman had seen all that Quynh had done with her lives, and wanted to know her the same way? It was as jolting as being thrown from a horse, as thrilling as a green valley after too many days coming down from scree and scrabbled hills. Quynh kept on, changing caravans whenever hers stopped so that she could keep moving. Most towns only had a bit of trade-tongue, but some of the elders and her fellow travelers said that the grasslands with horses, bounded by trees, were to the north and west of a great inland sea. 

She kept going. She tried speaking aloud in her various tongues to the woman before she slept, telling her that she was coming to her, to not travel too far, to wait for Quynh, but whenever the woman spoke in Quynh’s dreams, it was no language Quynh had yet learned. 

In the Amorites’ main city, she caught a local fever that killed her, but she was sick long enough that she died alone in an inn’s upstairs room generously paid for by her last employers. It was months before there would be a new caravan that might take her on as a guard. In the meantime, the innkeeper was only astonished so long by her recovery-- she took work at a pottery to pay for her room. 

The different clays, the heat of the air, the colors of the earth were a distraction that carried into her dreams. To her surprise, the woman seemed to pick up that clue, and Quynh’s dreams were full of pots and waterskins and tooled leather in styles distinctive enough that Quynh could draw them, and ask in her pidgin where such items were made.

North and west, in grasslands around and above the inland sea, everyone said.

She already knew that, but she supposed it was nice to have it confirmed-- the place was real and not mere sleep-imaginings. While Quynh worked and rested and waited for a new chance to move, the dream-woman’s surroundings remained of the deserts and hills not unlike those around Quynh. 

At last, Quynh found some merchants in need of a guard, and she took up her guise as Qiang again. The caravan was headed due north and west, to a town on a sea that overlooked a narrows that bordered that great inland sea. Two months in to their travels, they were caught in a sudden sandstorm. Quynh died, and when she woke she found the whole train suffocated by sand. She salvaged what she could for food, water, and shelter, but felt dread. As the only one living and as one who had never completed the route, Quynh could only approximate the landmarks she’d stupidly not paid much mind to. She tried, always, to stay in line with that one constant star to the north, but the traders kept few maps, and Quynh did not have much hope—each trader had their particular route and secret contacts, and no one wanted to share too much lest the guards get greedy and seize the whole train once they knew where they were going. 

The maps she found therefore meant little to her, but she brought them with her in any case. Perhaps the woman in her dreams would know what they meant and make maps of her own to guide Quynh toward her.

Quynh ran out of food, then shade, then water. She died, many times. She found an oasis or two, but thought now there was some truth to those stories of the spirit world, because all she did was wander and thirst and die. She could no longer tell what was waking, what was dying, what were the hallucinations the newer prophets said were man’s way of learning to move past their sins. She thought at times she might still be in that room where she’d died of that fever—except she’d never had her eyes plucked from her head by a buzzard, so it was hard to say that was a dream. At least the buzzard died, and provided some days' survival on its hot blood and cancerous flesh.

And then, she woke again—burnt, parched, the air on her face scorching until a shadow moved over. The shadow blinked into clarity-- a dark-haired, dark-clothed, pale woman’s face with sky-eyes.

“Am I dreaming?” Quynh asked. 

“Not a very good dream, if you are,” the woman answered in a tongue Quynh had only learned the rudiments of, from a bear of a man with bone in his ears said the grasslands riders would speak it. The woman smelt like sweat and horses. 

“I can die again if you’ll stay,” she thought she answered, and though Quynh died and woke and died again, she awoke to find she was lying atop smelly, soft carpets under an awning, nearby to a hole in the ground that she would call an oasis. A less generous, less recently-dead person would have called it a puddle. Two ground-tethered horses snorted nearby.

She lived, and yet it was paradise; the waterskin at her hand was full, the dream-woman was here and crouched down at a small fire that gave off food smells a few arms’ lengths away, and the stars, so different from those in her home, winked overhead, including that north star she’d hoped would bring them together. The air was cooler, and the animal sounds around her helped her forget her own death rattles.

She drank the skin empty, then struggled upright. The woman, hearing Quynh rouse, turned and strode toward her, then squatted at the edge of the carpets.

“How many times have you died?” Quynh asked the woman. 

“Enough to be tired of dying alone.” At least, that was what Quynh thought she said. “Die with me next time?” Standing, she extended her hand to Quynh while jerking her chin toward the food and the fire. 

Quynh felt a smile crack her face—that invitation was clear. It was also deeply funny, in a way she expected that only this woman would understand. 

“Yes. Eat first, die later.” 

The woman’s sky-eyes crinkled shut as she barked out a laugh, then hauled Quynh to her feet. Quynh knew she lived, then-- she smelt foul and felt worse, her legs shaky and her head aching still. The woman’s hands were rough from reins and the handle of the axe she’d wielded in Quynh’s dreams. They had never clasped hands in dreams. This was real. Quynh let the woman lead her forward—whatever came next, they’d face it together.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a fandom old, and really appreciate comments.


End file.
